Quotes About Writing

I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

Às vezes sinto-me tão desesperado que me sento a escrever como quem chora". Eugénio de Andrade

William Faulkner was once asked how he went about writing a book. His answer: "It's like building a chicken coop in a high wind. You grab any board or shingle flying by or loose on the ground and nail it down fast." Like becoming a pastor.

All serious and good writing anticipates precisely this kind of reading-ruminative and leisurely, a dalliance with words in contrast to wolfing down information.

Joel Henderson was once asked how he had managed to write all those books. He replied that he had never written a book. All he did was write one page a day. With his limited energy and restricted imagination, a page at a time was all that he could manage. But when a year was up he had a 365-page book.

Lectio divina provides us with a discipline, developed and handed down by our ancestors, for recovering the context, restoring the intricate web of relationships to which the Scriptures give witness but that are so easily lost or obscured in the act of writing.

from chapter 29, "Write In a Book What You See") "heuristic writing - writing to explore and discover what I didn't know. Writing as a way of entering into language and letting language enter me, words connecting with words and creating what had previously been inarticulate or unnoticed or hidden. Writing as a way of paying attention. Writing as an act of prayer.

Maybe the secret of the pessimistic aphorism is actually quite simple, even formulaic: one is always pretending to be a writer.

But the truth is that I am a pessimist… except when writing about pessimism. I've managed to make pessimism a form of therapy.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

I begin my days by practicing piano, which I do badly but with ardor. Then I read for a while. I write until I'm too hungry to keep writing and then after lunch I spend some time in my garden before writing again. I want to also study French, but I rarely do. As I meander my way through one of these days, it occurs to me that my work life resembles the life of an eighteenth-century aristocrat.

Speaking of privilege, David said when he gave me her biography, it is a privilege to spend your life writing. Not a luxury, he clarified, but a privilege.

I'm writing a story in my journal, and I'm searching for a true voice. I make my way through layers of acquired voices, silly voices, sententious voices, voices that are too cool and too overheated. Then they all quiet down, and I reach what I'm searching for: silence.

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Vladimir decided to bin his second attempt at his Partisan memoirs and to begin writing a book entitled How to Survive the Years Leading Up to Death. Peter observed that all years were years leading up to death, so why not just call the book How to Survive.

It's amazing, if you know what you want to say, how fast it is to write.

I was writing short films and I was going through this really, really, really terrible end of a relationship that I didn't want to be going through. It was too much for me to process and all of a sudden I had this idea for my first feature film and I knew right away I had to start writing it.

Another mistake is presenting too much background information, and doing so in the first few pages. Writers should begin their stories with the event that kicks off the story, and then spoon-feed us background information only when it's needed to understand what's going on." [ A Conversation with Evan Marshall ( Writers Write , September 1999)]

In my personal life, dark material is kind of an emptying out - it leaves more room for light. If I'm writing a particularly awful scene, something is released in the process.

I think one of the keys to better writing is releasing all of your ideas and to not be afraid. Dream big. This could be the greatest novel in the world you know.

I only think in the following terms: writing, recording, releasing. That's what I have control of. What I don't have control is whether critics or the public like what I do.

I probably have a higher opinion of my writing than the average person, at least when I'm in a good mood, but I don't really think of my plays as only being relevant to a particular month or year.

I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious.